Rackspace to use Akamai as their CDN provider

Rackspace announced today their new relationship with Akamai Technologies, Inc. as Rackspace’s new Content Distribution Network (CDN) provider. Akamai Technologies, Inc. is publicly traded (NASDAQ: AKAM) company founded in 1998. Akamai has a pervasive, highly distributed cloud optimization platform with over 73,000 servers in 70 counties within nearly 1,000 networks. For up to date Akamai facts and figures, click here.

If you are currently a Rackspace customer and are using Cloud Files CDN, your account will start using Akamai CDN in the coming months, you don’t need to do anything, the transition will be automatic and painless – Rackspace wrote in an email to existing customers.

The following is a list of FAQs provided by Rackspace, if you want to know more about Rackspace’s new partnership with Akamai, click here to read their blog.

FAQs

How will I be affected?
Once we have made the change to Akamai, your CDN content will be served over Akamai’s expanded global network. Your current CDN URLs will be supported by Akamai, which means there will be no need for you to change the way you are serving your CDN content today. We expect the transition to be seamless for you.

Will there be any changes in pricing?
NO, Rackspace Cloud Files will be honoring its new reduced bandwidth pricing for CDN!

What is happening with Limelight?
The first major outcome from this new relationship will be the implementation of the Akamai’s CDN for our Cloud Files customers. We expect no customer impact during this transition from Limelight to Akamai. Once we flip the switch to have content served by Akamai, Akamai will begin supporting both new URLs and all existing Limelight URLs.

This means that customers who currently have Limelight URLs coded into their websites will continue to serve content using those URLs, but they will be distributed over the Akamai network. At this time, we do not have any plans to discontinue the Limelight URLs.

Once the transition is complete, if a customer requests their URL (either in the Control Panel or via API) for an object, they will be presented with a new Akamai URL. This does not mean that their old URLs are invalid. However, as we release new features like CNAME and SSL, customers will need to reference their new Akamai URL instead of their legacy URL.

When will we begin implementing Akamai?
Rackspace will be migrating customers in the first half of 2011. Rackspace will notify you once all of our customers have been migrated.

What new features can we expect and when?
Our current projected product roadmap is as follows:

1Q 2011

SSL – SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) will allow customers to deliver content more securely, all the way from the edge to the origin servers.

Edge Purge – This feature will allow customers to immediately remove their content from the network. Without this feature, removing content can take upwards of 3 days to process.

2Q 2011

CNAMES – CNAMEs will allow customers to turn complex CDN urls that are often long into shorter, branded urls for their public content. We are targeting to have this feature completed in 2Q 2011.